Archives reveal importance given to a hot brew during the Cold War

By Peter Day

12:01AM BST 25 Apr 2005

It is an old adage that an army marches on its stomach, and for the British soldier nothing was more vital to accompany his rations than a mug of tea.

So it should come as no surprise that the War Office conducted secret trials to ensure that the men at the front got their brew of char at just the right ambient temperature, without scalding their lips. It has taken more than 40 years for the results of the research, conducted at the Clothing and Equipment Physiological Research Establishment at Farnborough, Hants, to enter the public domain in files released at the National Archives at Kew, south-west London.

It fell to Major Alec Greef, a Second World War veteran who had earned a Military Cross in Italy with the 4th Bombay Grenadiers, to conduct the quest for the perfect pint mug to hold tea. In technical memorandum number 214, of May 1962, he reports how he tested four different makes - one of aluminium, one enamelled, one polypropylene and the other polythene.

He dropped them on concrete floors and found that the aluminium soon dented and the enamel chipped. He tried a heat test with boiling tea and found that the aluminium cup took so long to be cool enough to touch that the tea was also cold. The enamel mug was almost as bad.

The plastic mugs were way out in front, except that when exposed to very high temperatures they were inclined to melt. But they had one drawback that no sergeant major inspecting his men's kit would tolerate. They were inclined to stain.

The application of Vim scouring powder and military elbow grease failed to make them spotless again. The major was equal to the challenge. He recommended manufacturing the mugs in dark colours that would not show the tannin residue from the tea.

Major Greef moved on to assess the merits of a new-fangled spiral spring bed mattress against the standard barracks-issue rectangular mesh. Not content with a sleep test, the major recruited two volunteers, weighing 12 st and 13 st - gender unspecified - to "romp on the bedsprings for two periods of two minutes each".

The 13 st volunteer then walked up and down on the springs, establishing that the new model quickly developed a 10 inch sag in the middle, and was quite unsuitable for military use.

Other tests involved the flammability of Army ponchos and the shape-retention qualities of socks worn by the Women's Royal Army Corps. They were requested by an officer known only as Brigadier Q, the code name used by James Bond's gadget expert.

While it is easy to mock the Heath Robinson research methods, they did form part of a defence research establishment which has since been partially privatised under the name Qinetiq, and is tipped for a £1 billion stock market flotation this year.